Bob Iger Wins Disney Proxy War

Movies

If it were put up for a vote, do you think the passengers aboard the Titanic would have voted for the iceberg? I think it’s possible. In today’s annual shareholder meeting, Disney CEO Bob Iger announced that he had won the proxy war instigated by Nelson Peltz that sought to get Peltz and Jay Rasulo, a former Disney CFO, to the board of directors. Iger and the rest of the board were re-elected by shareholders “by a margin of about 75 percent to 25 percent,” according to The Hollywood Reporter, with Iger getting 94% of the vote for his seat. Iger had a lot of support, most notably from George Lucas, former Disney CEO Michael Eisner, and Walt Disney’s grandchildren. Iger thanked the shareholders for their faith in him and, after denouncing the proxy war as “distracting,” he swore to “focus 100 percent of our attention on our most important priorities, growth and value creation for our shareholders and creative excellence for our consumers.”

I’m not overly surprised by this, especially after Peltz’s comments about all-black and all-female casts; he gave his opponents the perfect opportunity to make him look bad – and paint anyone who sided with him as guilty by association. Even without that, I don’t think a vote against Iger and the board was likely, despite things like that America First Legal letter that exposed some really sick things Disney is putting in its kids’ entertainment. Disney is too far down the woke road to reverse coarse now, barring a massive, fortune-burning disaster. Hoping for Disney to change at this point is useless; the best possible scenario is for other studios to learn from Disney’s mistakes and paint themselves as the alternative for normal people, kind of like what Universal Studios is doing on the theme park front with its Epic Universe. Universal is also doing this with its movies, which is why DreamWorks films like Kung Fu Panda 4 and Puss in Boots: The Last Wish were successful while Wish and Elemental weren’t. Meanwhile, don’t get your hopes up for a reversal of course for Marvel or anything halfway decent to happen to Star Wars. As for the shareholders, I hope they get everything they just voted for, which I’m sure they will. To that end, look at the immediate result of Iger’s win, courtesy of Nerdrotic:

LOL pic.twitter.com/nkMDObiCgF

— Nerdrotic (@Nerdrotics) April 3, 2024